


Princess But-Why

by Fan_by_Proxy



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fairy Tale Style, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-02-04 01:38:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1762039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fan_by_Proxy/pseuds/Fan_by_Proxy





	Princess But-Why

Once upon a time, in a kingdom rather like other enchanted kingdoms of the time, there lived a king and queen. Whether they were deeply in love or not is inconsequential, for loving or not the royal couple did as all royal couples do in these stories: they made a baby. A princess, to be precise.

  
This princess, like other princesses, was kind and graceful and beautiful...and woefully undereducated. The King had seen no reason to teach a daughter things that might accidentally cause her to develop wits or a personality outside of the Expected Princess Protocol (or EPP, if you prefer acronyms to actual words). And the Queen, though kindly and good, was equally undereducated and therefore in no position to improve her daughter's situation.

  
Because a fairytale without a dragon is like a duck with no Peking, we can now introduce the far more  ~~marketable~~  dangerous Mxlpltznyk the Ferocious. Of course the only being in the kingdom that referred to him as such was his mother; most all the other kingdom inhabitants referred to him as  **AAAH GODS HELP US HE'S BURNING EVERYTHING HE'S EATEN THE SHEEP HE'S HIDDEN ALL THE LEFT SHOES SOMEONE SAVE US HEEEEELP!**  which was a mouthful, but very accurate.

  
Now Mxlpltznyk (as we are not citizens of the kingdom, we are free to refer to him by his actual name) had ransacked and razed villages, terrorized merchants, hoarded gold, set up an estate in a spooky crumbling castle in an inhospitable location, but he was short one accomplishment required of all dragons: he had yet to kidnap and hold hostage a fair maiden. As he was often reminded by his mother over Sunday supper, 'there's no time like the present and finish your peasant'; so Mxlpltznyk picked a castle at random and set siege. Naturally it was the castle of our goodly and aforementioned princess.

  
To appease the dragon (and because the queen was pregnant again), the king handed over the princess and proclaimed that any knight-of-noble-birth-who-could-slay-the-vicious-dragon-and-rescue-the-princess-and-return-her-at-least-three-quarters-safe-and-or-sound would recieve a handsome reward and also the princess' hand in marriage. If you'd noticed he'd left off promises of succeeding him on the throne and what-not, well that was because he was still banking on the baby in the Queen's belly being a son.

  
The princess was not at all happy to be plucked from her hand by a cold and scaly hand and flown halfway across the world to be put up in a dusty old tower with nothing to do but needlepoint the day away. She was more accustomed to doing so in the comfort of her own home, thank you very much. It didn't help that she would lose her stitches when some knight gallant came riding up reciting silly rhyming poetry and brandishing all manner of phallic weaponry and have to redo tremendous sections while the dragon had himself an armor-plated snack.

  
Necessity might be the mother of all invention but Tedium is the mother all troublemaking. As the pretty princess couldn't read the mysterious tomes in the dragon's library (at least four of which would have told her  _exactly_  how to get out of her predicament), she decided instead to strike up a conversation. "Oh great and terrible dragon," she said as he picked gristle from between his teeth, "why have you brought me to such a place as this?"

  
"Because," he rumbled, drawing up a little and puffing out his chest, "that is what is done."

  
"Oh." Well it was an answer, but not a very good one. The princess frowned, the expression foreign and frankly unacceptable according to the EPP, and then she asked "But why?"

  
"Well...because I'm a dragon and I have a castle and gold and a fondness for staff-bearing knights. It's great, they come with their own toothpicks." The dragon replied, a little disconcerted.

  
"But  _why_?" the princess repeated.

  
Great warning puffs of smoke wafted from the dragon's nostrils. "It's not very princess-like to ask 'but why'; not at all."

  
The princess cocked her head, brow still furrowed in a most un-princesslike manner. "But why?"

  
Irritated, the dragon turned his back on the princess and spread his wings, taking off into the sky with a frustrated 'harrumph'. The princess looked at the half-undone needlepoint in her lap, and then up at the retreating figure, and then back at the needlepoint. And then she smiled.

  
For the next month, the princess peppered the persnickety dragon with questions. Why was the sky blue? Why was his butt so big? Why do knights always come riding right out in the open when it's very clearly obviously a trap? And always, always following up with "but why?".

  
This was greatly upsetting for Mxlpltznyk; not because he didn't have very good answers (as dragons tend to be better-read than princesses), but because it was really annoying to be questioned every time he sat down. Not to mention none of his brothers or sisters had a princess constantly asking him 'but why?'. There had to be a better alternative than this! At the end of his tether, the dragon plucked up the princess and set her down outside the crumbling castle boundaries. "I've had more than enough of your lip Princess But-Why." he growled. "Go home and go bother your parents with your questions!"

  
"Thank you Dragon." the now-named princess said with a curtsy, as she still had princessly manners despite developing the un-princessly habit of asking questions. As had become his custom, the dragon turned his back on her and left with a 'harrumph'. Unconcerned awith being deposited on the outskirts of a crumbling dragon-guarded castle in just a pretty dress and shoes not meant for long walks, Princess But-Why simply took her skirts in hand and started to walk.

  
It wasn't a very long walk as a knight-gallant was fast approaching with his vassals. He lifted the princess onto his valiant steed of impeccable cleanness and made a much quicker return to the kingdom. This of course kicked off an enormous celebration, which was just what the kingdom needed as the queen had died in childbirth and only delivered another princess anyway.

(That princess the King shipped off to another kingdom and another story)

  
And as he had promised, the king gave the knight-gallant several social promotions and Princess But-Why's hand in marriage, and begrudgingly named him the heir despite having the fruit of his loins back in his possession and also  _standing right there_.

  
Despite being woefully undereducated still (though smarter than she was at the beginning), the princess went to her father and asked him some very important questions. "If I'm your daughter, why am I not your heir?" "Why do I have to marry this person that I neither know nor love?" And of course "But  _why_?"

  
The frustration of not being able to come up with a series of acceptable answers, the king keeled over dead. Fortunately for us and Princess But-Why, his proclamation granting the knight-gallant Kinghood hadn't yet been ratified by the governing body and was therefore null and void.

  
Princess But-Why ascended the throne and eventually married a man with whom she fell in love with over a reasonable period of time and had a baby princess of her own, whom she made sure to educate. And of course, she and her kingdom of newly-educated everyones lived happily ever after.

**The End**


End file.
